Reporter Volume 25, No.11 November 11, 1993

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff

Things change, Beverly Bishop knows, and often the key to a happy and
successful life can be the ability to adapt to change, and to accept
the opportunities and challenges that change often unexpectedly
brings.
	Bishop, a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department
of Physiology at UB, which will honor her this December for 40 years
service to the university, became a scientist at a time when women did
not often have such opportunities. She is a wife, a mother, an
airplane pilot, a world traveler, a researcher, and an innovative
teacher who has always used cutting edge technology to give students
the information they need to be successful.
	In her office, surrounded by signs of her ongoing
activities--handbooks for students, charts and photographs, souvenirs
from Japan and other countries, and the computer on which she creates
her innovative course materials--Bishop seems a born scientist, a
woman who is curious, engaged, and continuing to move forward in her
field even after many years of involvement in it.
	So it comes as a surprise to learn that she became a scientist
almost by chance.
	"As an undergraduate, I majored in math and experimental
psychology, and had never heard the term physiology," she says. "By
the time I received my master's in psychology from the University of
Rochester, I was married. I came to Buffalo in 1947 when my husband
got a job here and I was expecting my first and only child. After my
son was born, I needed intellectual stimulation, and I took a
physiology course, which really turned me on. I wasn't very serious
about graduate work, but I was encouraged by my professors.
	"My husband got a public health fellowship to study
biochemistry at the University of Glasgow in 1955. When we got there I
presented myself to the physiology department, which had a line they
needed to fill and so they welcomed me. There were 60 experimental lab
set-ups there, and to work with students, instructors had to know all
60, so I had to learn in a hurry.
	"When I came back to Buffalo, Dr. Hermann Rahn had just taken
over the Department of Physiology, and things were exciting. Rahn was
bringing in foreign postdoctoral students--all kinds of people who
later became famous in their fields.
	"He also made a mark because of his effort to bring in women.
We have a large number of women in the department now, which was
Rahn's doing. He was married to a landscape architect, and recognized
the value of her career.
	"At that time UB was just serving Western New York, almost as
a city college. I remember very well when we changed from a private
institution to a state one. In our last night as a private institution
in 1962, there was a banquet for the American Physiological Society at
which they served wine. The next day, serving alcohol on campus was
illegal.
	"UB didn't hire its graduates, but I was committed to Buffalo,
and Dr. Rahn found me a teaching assignment and moved me from
part-time to full-time. I designed my own neurophysiology course. At
first it was a lab course, but larger numbers of students made that
impossible later.
	"Because all my students weren't necessarily in the lab--labs
were there, but optional--I used my husband's camera to take pictures
of the lab for my lectures, and made tape recordings to go along with
the pictures. Eventually I used slide shows--a powerful teaching tool.
At one point the slide shows I had created were sold all over the
world for other neurophysiology courses, with a book in which each
page matched one of the slides. Of course, it was all very primitive
compared to the computer technology we have now."
	Despite some initial resistance to computers, Bishop soon
incorporated them into her innovative teaching methods, which she will
demonstrate at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting this month.
Her current method involves slides, created by computer; each features
one particular idea written out clearly for student comprehension.
Other slides of charts, pictures, and diagrams provide necessary
detail about those ideas. Students are also given a coursebook which
Bishop rewrites every year, with a page that matches every slide and
on which students can write their own comments. 
	With the aid of her computer, she says, "I make these visual
aids whatever size I want, and label them however I want. I've been
worried about copyright in some cases, but the only thing I ever had
to take out was a Family Circle cartoon.
	"I've taught this way for the last two or three years, and
it's been very intellectually stimulating. I have to choose my words
so carefully, in exactly the way I want students to have them. It
keeps me on track, and I know by the end of the hour that I have
really covered what I want to.
	"Coverage is the name of the game in neurophysiology, because
it's so broad," she says.
	Bishop has taught many courses during her long career at UB,
and in her department she currently holds the position of course
coordinator, overseeing supervised teaching. She has won numerous
awards, including several Innovative Teaching Awards from UB, the
Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the First Decade
Award from the Dean of Health Related Professions. 
	She works with numerous postdoctoral students, and her
research continues in interdisciplinary areas having to do with motor
control, with a primary area in neural control of respiration. Current
research also involves her in neurodentistry (a word she says she
coined), in physical therapy and exercise science, and with the
Research Institute on Addictions on Main Street, for which she works
with a former graduate student, developing non-invasive tests to
assess neural and motor systems in alcoholics.
	"Neuroscience is completely different than it was even ten
years ago," Bishop says. "Science itself is so dynamic, wonderful but
frightening. But these are tough times for young people in the field,
and I worry about that. They spend so much time writing grants, and
with peer review. It's not that they're doing bad science, but just
that there's not enough money to go around. I think the United States
may be headed for difficulty with science.
	"When I was taking my medical physiology course about 1957 or
58, there was only one other woman taking the course. I was not aware
of being discriminated against; I had to be told, but when I was told,
I said, 'yes, that's the way it was.' I'm overwhelmed by the situation
that women are in, and although I've never been an outspoken feminist
myself, I give credit to the women who have opened up the sciences. I
feel like I've made a worthy contribution, which Dr. Rahn--more than
some others--supported. And I married the right man, too. Men and
women are very different, and shouldn't have to be competitive.
	"I've been teaching at UB for 35 years. I saw the dorms go up,
the VA Medical Center go up, the North Campus go up. And growing
diversity here has been significant. The things we're teaching now,
they weren't teaching then. It's been an exciting life."